Quietly Deteriorating
by Max Brown
Summary: I'm quiet and breakable and scared. Too scared to take that kind of a risk. All I can do is let it build up and build up and over time, I become so numbed by the pain that I stop feeling anything. Set sometime during Season 3. JAM.


Every day is impossible. I don't know how I get through each one, but every night, I end up staring at my ceiling and thinking about doing it again the next day. Playing back all those empty moments filled with the back of his head that I've gotten to know so well. His messy golden hair, and the way his neck is bent forward to reach over his desk.

Quietly deteriorating inside my head.

My body makes up for my mind's incapacity, and drives to work, picks up the phone and dials in the extensions, purely by rote. It's the same fluorescent lights, the same chair, and yet it feels different. It feels like a role in a movie, or some kind of game that I fulfill every day. Meaningless. I pretend to be the Brand New Beesly, pretend to be happy as always, and no one comes close enough to see through my gossamer outer shell.

Yes, Jim has been acting distant, and then there's Karen, but really, it's me that I can't seem to forgive. Because I'm the one who put myself in this position. I'm the one who watched him slowly fall in love with me, and did nothing to stop myself from doing the same. I'm the one that said no when he finally told me. I'm the one who said no again after letting him kiss me. After letting myself kiss him. After I really knew that he was more a part of me than Roy would ever be. I'm the one who watched silently as he transferred to Stamford, letting him go through the same suffering that I now go through.

It makes sense that he chose Karen over me. Karen's a sexy, confident businesswoman. She gets up in the middle of the day to wrap her arms around him from behind and kiss him. She's the kind of person who always has something clever to say, rather than me. Shy, generally likeable but not thought of as much deeper than that, me.

She walks over to his desk, and he swivels his chair around and leans back and smiles, and I can't break. I've fantasized a hundred ways of going up to him and yelling at him, telling him all I gave up for him and how now he ignores me. Imagined breaking down in sobs at my desk, and him comforting me, and revealing that he still has feelings for me. Imagined his strong hands warm on my back, imagined my mind thawed from his warmth and having him and returned to its normal, functioning state.

But I can't do that. I can't bring myself to break through that hard, blank outer layer and risk telling him what he told me. I'm not strong like him, cocky, confident, brave. I'm quiet and breakable and scared. Too scared to take that kind of a risk. All I can do is let it build up and build up and over time, I become so numbed by the pain that I stop feeling anything.

Why does nobody notice me? Every day as I stare downcast at the phone I know too well, never smiling, and I no longer go out of my way to speak to these people I work with, I silently scream _Notice me!_ All I want is for just one person to ask if everything's okay. Just one. Just one person to care enough about me to notice that there's something wrong.

Jim should be that person. Jim should be the one I can talk to, the one I can count on to have my back. He's gone in more ways than one, and every day that he doesn't see that there's something wrong, it hurts more.

The pain is a kind of hatred. A hatred for him for not noticing me, for making me feel this way. A hatred for Karen for taking him from me. A hatred for everyone in the office for not caring about me enough to talk to me. A hatred for myself for not being brave enough to tell him. But that big a hatred suppressed, squished down to fit inside my head, breaks down into poison, and my mind is shut off. It can't function right.

Every now and then, he'll talk to me. Make some kind of flippant comment and smile, like I should smile back and act like everything's the same as it always was. And as I remember, the poison kicks in, and I'm drunk off it, able to revel in my unhappiness and not have to deal with anything or anyone else.

The poison saves me, and I come to crave it. As I wallow in self-pity and the darkness of my misery, I can escape from the reality of the situation, and escape from having to deal with it. I can enjoy being hollow for the moment.

And yet, though all this, my face is blank, normal, my voice controlled as for the umpteenth time I answer the phone: "Dunder-Mifflin, this is Pam." It's an inward destruction that shows no remarkable signs on the outside. That would defeat the purpose.

Every day the poison takes a stronger hold. Every time I see him grin or smirk at the camera or hear his voice, and every time I see Karen, or them together, or see him smile casually at me on his way out, I slip a little further. I can't even face those three words, because even though they've been worn so thin that they've lost their meaning, the reality of them is too much to bear. The reality they bring to the pain, and the reality they bring to my infuriating inability be totally honest, no matter how hard I might try.

I leave every day telling myself that tomorrow will be the day. The day that he notices me, the day that I'm brave enough to get over myself and really talk to him, the day the hollowness will go away. As I drift to sleep, I'm still waiting.

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